Census Director Steven Dillingham faced sometimes harsh questioning from members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday after a Government Accountability Office report found the Census is behind in hiring staff and finding local partners to promote participation.

Through several hours of sometimes intense questioning, Census Director Steven Dillingham on Wednesday offered this response to House members worried about the success of the critical count that begins next month.

Don't worry. We got this.

But analysts at the Government Accountability Office, who released a new status report on the 2020 census as part of the hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, are not so sanguine.

<p>The report says that the Census is behind:</p><ul class="ee-ul"><li>in the hiring of people who will knock on doors to count those Americans who don't self-report.</li><li>in the number of community partnerships it needs to establish to help find difficult to count people.</li><li>in efforts to ensure that the technology being debuted with this census works and is secure.</li></ul>
<p>A lot is at stake in the outcome of the decennial count: $600 billion in federal funds are distributed each year based on the census count and so are the number of House members each state is allotted. In addition, the census is used to draw the district boundaries for local, state and federal officeholders.</p>
<p>"We are confident that we are on mission, on budget and on target," Dillingham said in response to the critical GAO report.</p>
<p>He said the Census will surpass the goal of recruiting 2.5 million applicants for the 500,000 people who will be hired as enumerators. He acknowledged that the 240,000 community partnerships the census has established is behind the pace needed to reach the goal of 300,000 by the start of the census but it is already more than were generated for the 2010 census.</p>
<p>Asked by ranking Republican committee member Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio to respond to Dillingham, J. Christopher Mihm, director of the GAO's Strategic Issues team, said: "I'm from the GAO and I'm paid to worry on your behalf."</p>
<p>The chief concern is with how successful the officials are in convincing Americans to fill out the census form online for the first time ever.</p>
<p>The estimate is that 60.5 percent of people will either do that or they will fill out and mail in the paper form, if they don't respond to the initial request to go online.</p>
<p>But if that estimate is just a few percentage points off, it will mean millions of additional people that enumerators will need to find.</p>
<p>Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., a former police officer, warned that the number of online scams in recent years will make people leery about providing personal information in an online format.</p>
<p>The most combative part of the hearing came when Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., castigated Dillingham for not providing a list that she and other members had requested showing the names of the census community partners by legislative district.</p>
<p>Dillingham said officials were checking to make sure it was OK to release the names of all of the partners.</p>
<p>Wasserman Schultz said she found this "baffling" since the partners are described by Census officials as "public."</p>
<p>Then Wasserman Schultz demanded to know who controls release of the list and asked Dillingham to promise that it would be available within the next few days.</p>
<p>Dillingham eventually said he didn't know exactly who was involved in the review, which Wasserman Schultz deemed "outrageous."</p>
<p>She accused Dillingham of deliberately withholding the list and of creating an obstacle to tracking down difficult to find communities.</p>

Staffing cutbacks, poor planning and inadequate outreach by the federal government all threaten an undercount of minority group members, the poor and rural Americans in the coming census, leaders of civil rights groups are warning Congress.

After failing a decade ago to count more than 1.5 million African-Americans and Latinos, as well as 50,000 American Indians and Native Alaskans, the Census Bureau's planned reduction of local offices and field workers for the enumeration this spring has sparked fears that the 2020 undercount will be even more significant — and with lasting consequences.

Such inaccuracies could result in several congressional seats being given to the wrong states, and billions of dollars in federal aid being wrongly allocated for the next decade, the civil rights advocates told a House panel on Thursday.

<p>"The risk for the nation and the risk for our communities is grave," National Urban League CEO Marc Morial, which advocates on behalf of African-American communities, told the Oversight and Reform Committee. </p><p>"When your constituents are not counted in the census, they remain invisible for the next 10 years," testified Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights. "There are no do-overs. We must get the count right the first time."</p><p>Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney expressed concern that will happen, considering the bureau is behind on hiring temporary workers to reach traditionally hard-to-count communities. The count begins this month in Alaska and nationwide in March. </p><p>"Cyber threats, limited broadband access, reduced language assistance and gaps in outreach efforts all threaten the success of the Census," the New York Democrat said. "With so much at stake, vigorous oversight of the 2020 Census is absolutely essential."</p><p>The once-a-decade headcount not only determines how more than $1 trillion in federal funding is allocated to states but also their number of congressional seats. Based on population estimates the government produced last month, 10 states mostly in the Northeast and Midwest are on course to lose one seat each and seven states mostly in the South and West are expecting to gain them.</p><p>Staffing issues aside, the panel also urged lawmakers to pressure the bureau to do more to offset the damage caused by the Trump administration's failed efforts to include a citizenship question on the Census, a lingering fear that may affect response rates within immigrant communities, said Arturo Vargas, CEO of the NALEO Educational Fund, a Latino advocacy group.</p><p>The bureau has a responsibility to "provide Latinos and the general public with assurances about the confidentiality of their data," he said. </p><p>Thursday's hearing is only the first in a series of Census oversight hearings planned this year, starting next month with testimony from Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, Maloney said. </p>

A federal judge is allowing a coalition of 15 states and the District of Columbia to be defendants in a lawsuit seeking to exclude noncitizens from being counted in the run-up to the re-allocation of congressional seats.

Last year the state of Alabama and one of its Republican congressmen, Mo Brooks, sued the Trump administration, arguing that the counting of undocumented immigrants in census figures used for determining reapportionment unfairly benefits states with higher numbers of noncitizens.

Alabama contends that counting the whole population — the practice used for apportionment since Congess began — rather than just citizens will cost the state one of its seven House seats (and therefore one of its electoral votes) following the 2020 census tally.

<p>Alabama's suit is a long shot: Not only does the Constitution specify that a census include "the whole number of persons in each state" regardless of citizenship status, but also the Supreme Court ruled in 2016 against two Texas residents who challenged the practice of using the whole population to draw the state's legislative districts. </p><p>But the decision permitting other states to come to the defense of the Commerce Department and its Census Bureau, made last week by U.S. District Judge David Proctor of Birmingham, nonetheless raises the profile of a case that has been plodding along in the shadows of the Trump administration's now-abandoned efforts to add a citizenship question to next year's national population count.</p>

The redrawing of legislative district boundaries. A 1967 federal law requires House members be elected from single-member districts that (within each state) have nearly identical populations. House maps must be redrawn after reapportionment but before the first congressional election of each decade, based on population changes in each state revealed by the census.